Exploring participatory video journalism in the classroom and the community

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Abstract

This article describes a journalism education project in which television students
worked collaboratively with teenagers in a community media club to make short
videos about issues that directly affected the teenagers. An analysis of this project
using action research methods draws on debates around media and community
participation from several theoretical “moments”. These include current debates
on online citizen media and participation, “civic media” and public news agendas
from the public journalism movement originating in the nineties in America,
and much older debates on participatory video production from the 1960s. The
author set out how various theoretical concepts from these debates are manifest
practically in the project. A key concept is the difference in the roles that the
“professional” journalism students and the amateur teenagers adopt in shaping
the story.